What you guys think of alembic ?

[Paul Oblomov]

Been trying to figure out how to render naiad simulations with motion blur in maya with mental ray. And came across the fact, that this is not possible! There's something wrong with .abc files I'm trying to feed to maya.

Any ideas ? Or better - examples! Vray is getting weird results too, but at least it doesn't crash This leads me to a fact, that .abc I'm getting is the cause.

[instinct]

As Alembic is baking per frame (similar to an animated proxy) my guess would be that it misses velocity which is needed for motionblur in this case. Or something similar.

Either way, when targeting VRay you'd prolly be better off having the Naiad people export vrmeshes instead (which is possible from naiad)

Regards,
Thorsten

[Morbid Angel]

I had a quick test with abc files from houdini, and motion blur was working with vray (this is in maya though).

[vlado]

There might be several reasons for this:

*) The velocity data has a different name in the Alembic file. We only recognize it if it's called "v" or "velocity". It also depends on whether it is written as standard Alembic velocity, or as an additional property in the abcGeom group.
*) The velocity has wrong units. The Alembic format specifies that velocity is in space units per second, but who knows what's written there in the end...

Best regards,
Vlado

[Paul Oblomov]

I was trying whole day.

.abc from naiad, bgeo->abc in houdini, crate .abc both max/maya different version, renaming point.velocity -> point.v -=- nothing works. Maya and mental always crash. Don't remember if emp loader inside maya 2012 crash too, but that's not the solution. Even .abc through mr abcimport shader....

Seems like nobody render mb with mentalray

P.S. I tried with latest nightly for max (vray) and naiad .abc merged file looked weird to me. The more geometric samples I set, the more alpha I get. Vlado - I can upload the test .abc file (about 70mb).

[vlado]

Yes, you can get me the file if you wish - maybe we'll figure out what's wrong with it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Paul Oblomov]

This one created with crate for max. Not sure it was latest one. I've tried frost, then exported to abc with crate.

http://rghost.ru/43454540

[Paul Oblomov]

Anybody ? It seems the problem is that maya doesn't support point attributes, like it exported from houdini or naiad Any ideas ?

[vlado]

Talk to bazuka... I think he finally gave up and settled on rendering through RealFlow .bin files.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Paul Oblomov]

Yeah I know. But... well why maya so stupid

[vlado]

You should probably report this to Autodesk, perhaps they will fix it in the next release.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Paul Oblomov]

Found a solution Frame relative sample......

But have to convert to rf first And then export rf to maya alembic.

Exocortex seems to alsways crash maya on rendering with mb. Will have to find a better way

[vlado]

Yes, render in V-Ray

Best regards,
Vlado